Turnbull, the old idealistic democrat, had so often reviled the democracy and reviled them justly for their supineness, their snobbishness, their evil reverence for idle things.  He was right enough; for our democracy has only one great fault; it is not democratic.  And after denouncing so justly average modern men for so many years as sophists and as slaves, he looked down from an empty slope in Hampstead and saw what gods they are.  Their achievement seemed all the more heroic and divine, because it seemed doubtful whether it was worth doing at all.  There seemed to be something greater than mere accuracy in making such a mistake as London.  And what was to be the end of it all? what was to be the ultimate transformation of this common and incredible London man, this workman on a tram in Battersea, his clerk on an omnibus in Cheapside?  Turnbull, as he stared drearily, murmured to himself the words of the old atheistic and revolutionary Swinburne who had intoxicated his youth: 

        “And still we ask if God or man
        Can loosen thee Lazarus;
        Bid thee rise up republican,
        And save thyself and all of us. 
        But no disciple’s tongue can say
        If thou can’st take our sins away.”

Turnbull shivered slightly as if behind the earthly morning he felt the evening of the world, the sunset of so many hopes.  Those words were from “Songs before Sunrise”.  But Turnbull’s songs at their best were songs after sunrise, and sunrise had been no such great thing after all.  Turnbull shivered again in the sharp morning air.  MacIan was also gazing with his face towards the city, but there was that about his blind and mystical stare that told one, so to speak, that his eyes were turned inwards.  When Turnbull said something to him about London, they seemed to move as at a summons and come out like two householders coming out into their doorways.

“Yes,” he said, with a sort of stupidity.  “It’s a very big place.”

There was a somewhat unmeaning silence, and then MacIan said again: 

“It’s a very big place.  When I first came into it I was frightened of it.  Frightened exactly as one would be frightened at the sight of a man forty feet high.  I am used to big things where I come from, big mountains that seem to fill God’s infinity, and the big sea that goes to the end of the world.  But then these things are all shapeless and confused things, not made in any familiar form.  But to see the plain, square, human things as large as that, houses so large and streets so large, and the town itself so large, was like having screwed some devil’s magnifying glass into one’s eye.  It was like seeing a porridge bowl as big as a house, or a mouse-trap made to catch elephants.”

“Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,” said Turnbull, smiling.

“Oh!  Where is that?” said MacIan.

Turnbull said bitterly, “In a book,” and the silence fell suddenly between them again.